Ebook readers

I know that several of you are ebook readers. I have been reading ebooks for several years. All the way back to the original Palm Pilot.

One of the concerns that I have is the future direction of ebooks. I do not want to get stuck with a bunch of books that I can no longer read. So to combat that that fear I remove DRM from some of the books or I stay with the biggest sellers figuring they will be the safest to survive.

I want to address 3 of the providers. Amazon (Kindle) Ereader.com and Fictionwise. Amazon is HUGE. They have already shown a willingness to offer a reader on iphone so they do not seem to be married to pushing hardware in the same manner that Apple does. This is good for us. They have recently released a reader for the PC. All steps in the right direction. I would not be surprised if they have a droid reader sometime in Q1 2010.

Fictionwise purchased ereader.com a coupe of years ago. I always suspected an incestuous relationship there simply because they supported the same format and because the prices were almost exactly the same. Recntly ereader released an Android reader. It will work with erader and Fictionwise books. Now, what makes this so intersting is that Barnes & Noble bought this company late last year. Because ereader has released a Droid reader that means that by default so has Barnes & Noble. B&N also released an ereader for the iphone mid 2009.

These are all good signs for us because it means that there will be two major players competing to get our $$$. Amazon will put a lot of pressure on B&N because Amazon puts the NY Times bestsellers on sale for $9.99. B&N (ereader and fictionwise) offer "micropay rebates" which lowers the cost of future purchases.

An example of how this helps us is that there is a new James Patterson book that B&N is advertising for $17.99 pre-rebate. Amazon offers it for $9.99. because both have demonstrated a propensity to support Android devices and their format we should be able to take advantage of both worlds instead of being trapped into the Nook or Kindle.

BTW, I own a Kindle but I read on my phone because it is more portable.

One thing you left out is, the Barnes and Noble reader, it's version of the Kindle, called the Nook uses...... wait for it...... ANDROID OS as it's operating system!

I am hoping that because of this, there will be a Nook type app for Android devices soon!

So far, I've tried several readers on my various Android devices... ShortCovers, Text2Phone, among others, and they are pretty disappointing.

I checked out the Kindle on my son's iPod Touch, and it was very nice!

That's one area the Android OS really needs to catch up on. I also like reading on my cell phone/Palm device, and right now, I miss it.

Click to expand...

I have used the Fictionwise ereader to read my Analog SF magazine. This reader is actually not bad, page navigation is pretty intuitive and nonintrusive. Check it out if you subscibe to one of the fictionwise periodicals.

I am new to ereaders, and at this point I'm tracking UPS for the shipment of my nook. I was wondering if there are developers working on apps for the nook already? If so, I'd love it if you could point me in the direction of any websites, bulletin boards, etc. I'd like to be informed about what's available. TIA.

I personally agree with you - I hate DRM, and so usually have my ebooks in text or rich text file formats and I buy a lot of books from baen.com - they are sci-fi and fantasy, so you may or may not enjoy those type of books, but if you do... they are DRM free! They TRUST their customers to not steal and their prices are great! They sell books for only a few dollars and they have several formats you can pick from.

I like the Nook's policy of allowing you to lend out the book for 2 weeks. I can understand the DRM protection to prevent people from limitlessly copying the book to other people. When I buy a real book, I often lend it out for others to read - then it gets returned to me (most of the time). IMO, e-books should work the same way.
I read on my Droid (with ereader). My wife reads on a Kindle. We can't really share like we could with real books

I'm curious if many people will steal apps for android phones and how many mp3's are pirated now that you can buy a song for a dollar with no DRM. If people don't steal that much, I'm thinking it would be a great model for ebooks. Sell them cheap and open and make money and not have to worry about hiring people to encrypt your products.

dgoakill, I have found it will drain the battery a lot since you are using the screen, but it will vary depending on your screen brightness of course. I'm not sure if the CPU in the Droid scales back cycles when being used only for light loads, so that could result in a better battery. I haven't seen that it does or doesn't, if anyone knows, please post that, as I would be interested to know.

Also:

I am trying to find an ereader that works like ubook does for my pocket pc. Sadly, ubook doesn't work on Android and the author said a lot of the code is for Windows only, so not sure if he will make android version.

If anyone knows of an android program that will read text files, that's all I want. I was using JJ Reader, then I realized it was cutting off lines and that's annoying. Also JJ Reader won't let me keep the text files in a zip archive. (though that's not major, all of my ebooks are in zip files since I had been using ubook for so many years).